Midwinter is the darkest time of the year. And darkness with cold and wind, frost and snow, sleet and slush, is particularly pronounced here in our latitudes. But winter is also the symbol of all destructive forces, indeed of death itself. We see how, already in the autumn, life ebbs out, the green forests wither, the profusion of flowers in the meadows is gone. The great host of small songbirds is also gone. Stillness, that is, lifelessness and darkness, prevails where previously songs in praise of life from thousands of small throats filled the sunlit fields and forests, gardens and parks with their exuberant flood of sounds. Now snow and ice dominate in the far North. These phenomena are the culmination of the coldness and stillness of death; yet they both demonstrate that death does not exist. Snow and ice constitute results of the vital functions of the universe; they are products of creation. Just as they can be created, so they can also be dissolved and again be recreated, and we see as a matter of fact that winter is created by virtue of coldness and darkness, while summer is created by virtue of warmth and light. Through spiritual science we see that living beings have an eternal life. This eternal life is also formed, from a mental point of view, as alternating mental summers and winters, which means, respectively, mental light in the mind and behaviour or way of being, and mental darkness in the mind and behaviour or way of being. And people are at the present time in such a cosmic epoch of winter.

Since we have thus an eternal life, our present earthly life is not, as is generally believed, the only physical life we have experienced or will come to experience. It is merely a link in a chain of previous physical earthly lives that we have experienced and future earthly lives that we will come to experience.

But why does the Godhead create this winter, this restriction of creation, so that it seems almost lifeless? Is it not in order to show people that death does not exist, and that life survives every form of what we call "death"? And is it not precisely here that people have their greatest fear? The great majority of people are very frightened of "death", which is generally believed to constitute a total end to their own experience of life. If this were the case, there would be absolutely no meaning or logic whatsoever in any being having such a single physical life. Everything must be chaotic and unjust. Indeed, the physical existence would be simply a culminating hell in the present physical earthly life of some people, while others would have a correspondingly radiant paradise in their present physical earthly life. How can this be just or be an expression of the absolutely highest love? But who says that life should be an expression of the very highest love? Quite apart from the fact that mankind has been told, through the principle of world redemption and its ensuing world religions, that God is love, and that we will develop into constituting the same image of God's behaviour or way of being, which is the same as becoming "God's image after his likeness", life itself shows in all ways that love is the keynote of the universe. It becomes evident through the fact that absolutely all Nature's processes of creation are ultimately a joy and a blessing for living beings.

When people do not understand this, it is because to a great extent they judge the Godhead's unfinished processes of creation as finished creations. Since these unfinished creations are not perfect they naturally cannot yet fulfil the loving purpose that they are intended to fulfil when their creation is complete. To these unfinished creations belong, for example, the creation of terrestrial human beings. That they are not finished is reflected in their relationship to their neighbours. People who avenge and hate, murder and kill, slander and persecute their neighbours, become envious, jealous and offended and cannot forgive, suffer from professional jealousy and desire to live at the expense of others, are inconsiderate and brutal and want to oppress, rule over and command others such people are unfinished human beings. That terrestrial human beings live therefore in war, massacre and destruction of each other's physical existence is a matter of course. The strong live to a great extent at the expense of the weak.

Mankind's state of Armageddon or hell is thus a question of creation or evolution. Do we not see that such an evolution is taking place? Some people are much closer than others to the great goal of being in "God's image after his likeness". We can see that mankind has developed from as far down as the level of the ape-man up to that of the modern man of culture. To what end is this evolution if it is not the same beings who go through it? But since it is the same people who go through evolution, then reincarnation or rebirth becomes here a reality. The "death" every human being, indeed every living being, must go through is thus no real or absolute death. The life of a being is, just like winter and summer, the result of a creation in substance or matter. The physical organism of a being is nothing other than a created phenomenon. It absolutely cannot be the creator. It can perish, but the creator lives on. It can thus be born again in a new created organism and, by virtue of this, continue to live on the physical plane until this organism is also worn out and has become useless. It can then be born again in a new organism and so on continuously until he has become perfect, has become identical with the keynote of the universe, love, and has thus become "God's image after his likeness".

When the human being has reached this state, this being is no longer a creator of darkness and suffering for other people, but is one hundred per cent a joy and a blessing for living beings. A community of such beings can, of course, create only a divine existence in "God's image after his likeness". And it is this future world kingdom on earth that is expressed as the "kingdom of God" or the "kingdom of heaven". It is to this kingdom Christ was referring when he said, "My kingdom is not of this world". This divine kingdom is today still not of this world, even if in many ways it is growing more and more into the physical world of mankind. It is true that people in certain fields create the deadly frost and cold, ice and snow of mental winter. Likewise in the physical winter, ice and cold, along with other deadly phenomena, rule, but this cannot prevent spring from bringing forth its sunlit, warming and life-giving being or climate. And this warming and life-giving climate of spring, which normally leads life into an abundance of sun, light and warmth, making it blossom, is a reflection of the all-embracing flood of rays of the Godhead.

Just as the physical winters are only temporary, brief epochs of darkness in terrestrial Man's physical life, so too are the mental winters a temporary epoch of darkness; only here it is different. While people can experience up to seventy or even a hundred physical winters in one earthly life, many earthly lives are necessary for coming through the mental winter zone. It is just such a winter zone mankind is experiencing at the moment, in the form of the Doomsday- or Armageddon-existence, with its world wars, atomic or nuclear weapons and other hellish machines. This mental winter is so hard and deadly that one cannot call it "animal", since the animals' methods of killing, and motives for killing, are almost too microscopic to consider when compared with people's capacity in the area of murder and destruction, and the infliction of pain and suffering. And in the purely "humane" area people's consciousness is still in many areas microscopic compared with their "animal" capacity. And we must therefore express this mental technique of manifestation as "devil-consciousness". This epoch is thus a cosmic principle of winter that is also temporary, even if it has to be seen in a cosmic light.

That this will not last is evident from the fact that one can already see many signs of spring; indeed, one can begin to feel the winds of spring thawing or melting the ice and snow. One of these cosmic winds of spring is the light and warmth in the hearts that light up in the dark time of physical midwinter, making people literally gild the world in this short epoch we call Christmas. Millions upon millions of candles are lit and are reflected in gold- and silver-glistening coloured decorations and Christmas trees. And it is also a reflection of this light of spring from a future summer kingdom of light that is reflected in all the many tons of gift parcels, letters and loving greetings that, from all corners of the Christian world, are sent out over the entire earth to relatives and friends. It is also the warming light from Bethlehem that is felt through all the many charitable organizations for those who are in need, in poverty and darkness. The closeness of God has to be felt in the middle of winter's epoch of death. It is as if everyone wants to be good in this epoch, especially on Christmas Eve. No one should starve or freeze on this holy night. Everyone wants to be good towards everyone else. But the spirit of God can be revealed only through the heart and the intellect. As there are so many hearts that light their cosmic candles at Christmas, lighting up the darkness with their incipient capacity for love, they have in union become a kind of shining cosmic illumination. In this cosmic illumination or atmosphere of love, the heavenly beings can come closer to the earth in greater hosts than is otherwise the case in the greyness of daily life. And it is such a heavenly host the poor shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem experienced. Here were the purity of heart and the feeling of God's spirit that could make the heavenly beings visible for the poor shepherds and give them the divine message of peace on earth and great goodwill to men, the great cosmic summer or kingdom of God that was come to people.

So all those people who from their hearts feel love for their neighbour and would like to create a merry Christmas in his heart are Christmas candles lit by God for this neighbour. The principle of the many millions of lit Christmas candles with their reflections in gold- and silver-glistening decorations or trimmings in the darkness of the midwinter night is a gift from heaven. They constitute a divine symbol of God's goal for mankind. Every lit Christmas candle is a symbol of a human being. Just as the lit physical Christmas candles contribute to illuminating and festively decorating people's lives both indoors and outdoors, in the streets and squares, at work and in the home, on Christmas trees and other places around us in the darkness of winter, so is each human being who has neighbourly love in his heart and intellect a Christmas candle lit by God in the cosmic winter darkness, the Armageddon in which people at the present time live.

It is this heavenly light in the heart that fulfils the angels' prophecy of peace on earth and the ensuing goodwill to men. And just as the physical candles lit by people occur in profusion, illuminating and enlivening their physical lives in the darkness of winter, so will every single human being on earth have his fire of love lit, and, sparkle like a living Christmas candle of the Godhead, radiating the light and warmth of his heart out to everything and everyone. This divine flood of the light of love, this heavenly illumination, which the collective terrestrial mankind will then radiate, is the birth of the kingdom of God on Earth. And therefore sounds the voice of God for mankind today: